untarring errors

[Emc2]

It seems to happen a lot when I untar something that has a lot of pictures in it. Currently, I'm trying to theme the Gnome Desktop...

Anyways, I get this error:
Cannot change ownership to uid 500, gid 500: Operation not permitted

Does this even effect anything? Sometimes the numbers are 1000 instead of 500...

[nukes]

If the target location is outside your home directory, you need to be root. You can only write files in your home dir. just open a console and type "su" then the root password. Like magic you will be the one with UID 0 (root)

[Emc2]

well, I don't have any other users setup on the system, as that's how it was when I got the laptop and I have yet to set one up. So I'm always root.

I'm getting these errors no matter what I untar...

[nukes]

Maybe if there's no UID 500 it won't let you change it to that?
You really should use a normal user for most things.

[Emc2]

I think I know what it was...

/mnt/e is a shared drive (fat32) between linux and WinXP. on the drive, there is a folder called 'linux stuff'. Today, I installed some cisco drivers on the laptop (RH8), and while they were installing, I got an error about the folder name, then the program quit. I copied the .tar.gz file out, and into the /root/ folder. Untarred it and installed it fine, with no errors.

I think it's the space in the name, but I haven't tested that theory out yet. Who knows, we'll see when I get home...

[nukes]

If it was on a FAT32 drive it may have been that the system couldn't chmod the file (like if you copy something to a windows partition, you'll get errors along those lines) as FAT doesn't have the same (or any) permissions apart from RHS, which are single bits. It wasn't designed for multiuser. I haven't had problems with spaces in fat32. I just create them the same as normal ("\ ") but I haven't done it through tar.
I realise you have already solved your problem, but I thought you might like a possible explanation for it.